The Leftovers 'No Room at the Inn' Recap: Repent in Dust and Ashes

The last time Christopher Eccleston's Reverend Matt Jamison had a Very Bad Day, The Leftovers brought us "Two Boats and a Helicopter," one of the first season's most harrowing hours. His miserable day in "No Room at the Inn" is worse. Much worse.

No character on this series suffers quite like Matt, whose faith is the fuel that drives him and the blade that wounds him. His life is a quagmire of Biblical proportions (Cats and dogs, living together! Mass hysteria!) but he navigates it all with an openness lacking in his similarly traumatized friends and family. God throws a mountain of shit his way and he wades through it with a forced smile. The way he soldiers forward, the way humility tempers his all-too-human rage, recalls tales of prophets, who had to put aside their base humanity to serve God. One must suffer if one wants to serve.

No wonder he prefers the Book of Job.

We learn about the good reverend's favorite Biblical story late in "No Room at the Inn." Stranded in the "encampment" outside of Jarden and without the wristbands that will allow him and his vegetative wife Mary (Janel Moloney) entry to their new home, desperation takes over. Mary is pregnant, the result of an intimate encounter three months earlier when she mysteriously woke up for a single night. Only Jarden's Miracle National Park can keep their unborn son alive. Matt knows this because Mary told him in a vision.

When one of the encampment's residents, a woman with a cross next to her trailer, offers him $500 to hit a man with an oar while yelling "Brian!", he must comply. That's the money he needs to pay for directions to a secret path back into town. Jacqueline Hoyt and Damon Lindelof's script never explains what this bizarre ritual means. Matt, having lived in this insane world for long enough, never pushes for an answer. Every institution, every belief system, was shattered during the Departure. Now every individual holds their own shard of faith that is unique to them. The old rituals are gone and new ones crop up with each passing minute.

Matt does what he must. He gets his money. He suffers more. He faces failure, rejection, and physical obstacles. The message is clear now: God has chosen him to suffer. God didn't vanish Mary three years earlier, but he took her anyway. He took Matt's church. He broke his hand. He punished him for having faith in his fellow man. He washed him away down a drainage tunnel during his ill-fated attempt to sneak into Jarden, a literal baptism of humiliation.

When we last see Matt, he is willingly letting himself be locked into stocks, on display in the encampment for all to see. What looked like cheap theatricality on the part of another splinter religion earlier in the episode now looks like his only appropriate final destination. In one translation of Job 33:11, it is written of God: "He puts my feet in the stocks, He watches all my paths." Here is Matt, more than willing to live up to his favorite section of his holy text. God cut off every escape route for a reason. This is where he belongs. He's here to suffer for the sins of the world. The Lord wills it.

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Matt could just be crazy, of course. Maybe he hallucinated his encounter with Mary. Maybe he hallucinated her warning that the baby would only survive in Jarden. Could John Murphy (Kevin Carroll) be right? Matt raping his wife seems more likely than God granting them a few hours together to conceive a child. You can't blame poor, miserable, downtrodden, frustrated-to-the-point-of-rage Matt for wanting to abandon his life and live in the squalor. We know by now that Jarden is special—but is it that special? Right now, it seems to be light on the "giveth" and heavy on the "taketh away."

"No Room at the Inn" is a high point in The Leftovers season two and further proof that this series is frequently at its best when it narrows its focus to tell one-off stories about individual characters. Unburdened by plot and mystery, we are simply allowed to spend time with one of the best characters on the show as he undergoes a transformation. It's a showcase for Eccleston, who has never been anything short of a quiet powerhouse on this show, and a showcase for director Nicole Kassell, who mines so much rich detail from every one of her central character's suffering.

That's The Leftovers in a nutshell—even when everyone is having a really bad time, you can't look away. This show wants you to care, to be curious. In its second season, it has become the most playful, watchful exercise in cinematic misery in TV history.

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